External Hard drive problem

[Linda Hanigan]

I am hoping someone can help me. I have a seagate 500gb external usb
hard drive. It has a NTFS filessystem. I was backing up to it last week
and caught the power cord so it was the equivalent of turning it off so
it was not unmounted. Now the drive is not recognized by Windows or
Linux. I tried doing mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /media/free. I tried
using -o force. Can anyone help me it says it can't find a drive on sda1
so I don't know if I can even reformat it.
              Thanks
              Linda